Marketing for your event can take many forms: email marketing, influencer content, paid advertising, or organic content like blogs and social media. The beauty of organic social media is its attractive, low-cost of $0. But YouTube, unlike its sister social media channels (and video in general), has statistics that might make you think twice about creating video content.

Companies who use videos in their marketing grow revenue 75% faster than those that don't.

Videos are 75% more likely to push a reader to your website than any other type of media.

With these figures in mind, it makes a little bit more sense to add video to your event marketing toolbox.

Here are our 3 favorite ways to ignite event marketing efforts using YouTube. Get ready to sell out your next event and drum up the much needed buzz for your future events.

1. Go #meta: build event hype by using videos about your event

This tip is a bit self-explanatory: in order to start using YouTube for your event marketing, you actually need videos to post. Take the meta approach and post videos about the upcoming event. Although video creation may make some cringe, there are some easy videos you can record on your own to promote your event.

If your event involves speakers, do exclusive interviews to promote and preview the content they can expect at the event. Do you have a high-profile keynote? Leverage their influence on social. Have them repost the video to their own YouTube channels and cross-promote on their social media. According to Google, 50% of 18- to 34-year old YouTube subscribers would drop what they're doing to watch a new video by their favorite creator.

Stumped about what other content to create for your YouTube channel? Give attendees a sneak peek or backstage look into your event before it happens. Is the venue a rare gem where events seldom occur? Can you reveal special event guests like an MC or a musical act? Scheduling a Google Hangout on Air is one of the easiest ways to schedule, record, and get that content directly onto YouTube.

2. Put your brand stamp on your channel page

Much like the marketing assets a brand has in its arsenal (website, collateral, one-pagers, and social media) must consistently show off the brand in a consistent way, so should YouTube highlight a brand. Take time to update your YouTube channel's look and feel with a header image (2560 x 1440 px is the going standard), an avatar (a logo works great here), and use this opportunity to add outbound links. In your About page, YouTube allows you to link to neighboring social properties as well as your website or event page.

Your brand can go one step further by leveraging the people you feature in your videos. Know an employee, planner on the team managing the event, or C-suite employee who is the physical embodiment of the brand? Bring in the human factor and feature them in video content!

Make sure your video subjects take the time to suggest related event videos via annotations to keep viewers on your channel and consuming content related to your upcoming event.

3. Take a cue from Google and optimize your videos for SEO

Now that you've got event-related videos and a shiny, new branded YouTube page, it's time to work some real marketing magic. Much like Google's search engine, YouTube is a search engine too but for videos. It has a sophisticated algorithm that relies on a number of factors to surface videos that your audience will find most valuable. This is the key to leveraging YouTube for event marketing: make sure any videos related to potential or current attendees are seen!

In order to understand which keywords to incorporate into your videos, you'll need to determine which ones to rank. Compile about 5 - 10 niche topics related to your event (these are peripherally related topics) and weave those into your channel.

Figuring out niche topics is simple. For example, if the event you are promoting is an awards show, you wouldn't want keywords that are directly related to award shows, for instance "Tony Awards," "Grammy Awards," etc.

A smarter move is to find your niche via keyword (make sure it's clocking in at least 300 searches a month) related to your event. Optimizing your YouTube channel's content for, say, the keywords, "event technology awards" may be more worthwhile in helping you get your video in front of those who work in event tech and move up the search ranks quicker.

Once you figure out a handful of keywords to optimize for, start weaving them into your channel content. Including these keywords into the video title is one most impactful places to start. Make sure it's relevant to the video itself (and not keyword stuffing) to maximize rankings. Also include your keywords in the video description and tags (so long as they're relevant) to signal to YouTube's search engine and your audience that relevant content lies ahead.